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A more secular Europe, divided by the cross

Throughout its modern history, however, the “European project,” as the Continent’s current faltering push for unity is known, has sought to keep religion and the unruly passions it can stir at arm’s length. The 1951 Treaty of Rome and other founding texts of what is today the European Union make no mention of God or Christianity. The Brussels bureaucracy, in its official account of Mr. Heitz’s religion-tinged flag, ignores the Virgin Mary, stating instead that the 12 stars “symbolize the ideal of unity, solidarity and harmony among the people of Europe.”

“There is a general suspicion of anything religious, a view that faith should be kept out of the public sphere,” said Gudrun Kugler, director of the Observatory on Intolerance and Discrimination against Christians, a Vienna-based research and lobbying group. “There is a very strong current of radical secularism,” she said, adding that this affects all religions but is particularly strong against Christianity because of a view that “Christianity dominated unfairly for centuries” and needs to be put in its place…

For the European Union’s most strident critics, the dispute has been a godsend, buttressing their argument that Brussels is an alien, meddling and sinister force. “I need to voice a serious and disturbing suspicion: that the E.U. is under the control of Satan or Satanism,” said Rafael Rafaj of the Slovak National Party, a far-right nationalist party.

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Once upon a time France, Spain and England where the three most powerful countries on Earth.
Since then they’ve shunned Jesus Christ and because impotent and broken. The secularist in the US are doing everything in their power to emulate Europe and unless Christians learn to fight back, they will.

and this is why Putin plays up the Russian Orthodox church. He knows the Eastern Bloc Orthodoxies are going to feel lost in the EU, so why not build a new coalition against jihadi’s and secularism?

budfox on June 18, 2013 at 8:25 PM

He at least understands that religion is part of a culture’s identity.

Which is why Islam erases all evidence of a prior culture.

The Taliban destruction of Buddhas in Afghanistan, the Islamists’ desire to get rid of the Sphinx in Egypt, and now news that Erdogan is going to turn Hagia Sophia, the greatest cathedral in Christendom, which Ataturk made a secular museum to avoid religious favortism, back into a mosque.

He at least understands that religion is part of a culture’s identity.

Precisely.

The Taliban destruction of Buddhas in Afghanistan, the Islamists’ desire to get rid of the Sphinx in Egypt, and now news that Erdogan is going to turn Hagia Sophia, the greatest cathedral in Christendom, which Ataturk made a secular museum to avoid religious favortism, back into a mosque.
Wethal on June 18, 2013 at 8:32 PM

I’m surprised POTUS didn’t talk about the brilliant Islamic architects who built the Hagia Sophia in his infamous Cairo speech.

“For the word of the cross is to those who are perishing foolishness, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. . . . For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not come to know God, God was well-pleased through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe. For indeed Jews ask for signs, and Greeks seek for wisdom; but we preach Christ crucified, to Jews a stumbling block, and to Gentiles foolishness, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Geeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men. . . . God as chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to shame the things which are strong…”(1 Corinthians 1:18, 21-25, 27).